Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Granger, Grant, and Grandpa

By June Anderson

The Battle of Chickamauga was a bloody disaster for both sides and a shaky victory for the South. By comparison, its aftermath, the Battle of Chattanooga, was one of the most picturesque battles of the Civil War and a glorious victory for the North. It was this third and decisive victory for the North (after Vicksburg and Gettysburg) that gave the Union the upper-hand and turned the tide of the War. Henry Annis fought at both Chickamauga and Chattanooga, but years later, when reflecting on his wartime adventures, he chose to write the account of his experience at Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Using Henry's memoir and the official reports and correspondence documented in the volumes of Official Records and The Rebellion Record, I have attempted to retrace Henry's wartime experience and reconstruct it in the larger context of this regiment, and of the battles themselves. I have also tried to trace the personal and military history of the man who told it the way he fought it, learn about his superior officers who controlled not only the outcome of the battles, but Henry's fate as well, and clarify his experiences with both a micro and macro account of the battles and the interim siege, striving for an overall picture of this part of the Civil War and Henry Annis's part in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: June Anderson
• Release date: Dec 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465711847

June Anderson

June Gossler Anderson has lived in Andover, Minnesota for over half her life and has been writing for most of it. Combining her love of history with her love of writing, she is a contributing writer for the history columns in the ABC newspapers. Her hobbies and passions include grandchildren, gardening, genealogy, and ghosts. (She conducts Ghost Tours in the City of Anoka May through October for the Anoka County Historical Society.)

Book preview

Chickamauga, Chattanooga,

Granger, Grant,

and Grandpa

A Civil War Memoir

June Gossler Anderson

Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Granger, Grant, and Grandpa

By June Gossler Anderson

Copyright 2012 June Gossler Anderson

Published by Smashwords

ISBN: 97814657111847

Dedication

This is for the Annis girls—Lucerne, Doris, my mother Lois—my sisters and cousins, their children and mine.

Preface

As sometimes happens when one is looking for a particular item, she chances upon something of greater value or interest. So it was with me several years ago when I was busily tracking down my ancestors. The Annis family seemed to be a good branch of the family tree to explore, for its roots go deep into American history and are well documented. Apparently Cormac, born in Enniskellen, Ireland in 1638, was the first one off the boat, for a Historical and Biographical Sketch of the Annis Family, compiled by the U.S. Research Bureau, located him in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1666 where he took Sarah Chase as his wife on May 15t of that year. During the next one hundred years the Annis family prospered and multiplied. Several of that number attended the Boston Tea Party and at least ten fought in the Revolutionary War.

Succeeding generations of Annises produced Abraham in 1674, John in 1700, Jacob in 1741, his son Jacob in 1769 who was the father of Charles, born in 1794, who was the father of Henry, born in 1831, which brings me full circle and back to the purpose of this narrative. Henry Brown Annis was my mother, Lois Annis’s, grandfather, and Mother had, as her legacy, a copy of his Civil War Memoirs.

The title on the first of the forty-nine handwritten pages identified the manuscript as Our Experience at and on Lookout Mountain, November 24, 1863. I eagerly set to work making a typewritten copy of the hard-to-read pages, hoping to find out what my newly discovered ancestor had experienced on that mountain. This was not an easy task, for time had faded parts of the ancient copy into oblivion, and more current events had crowded out knowledge of that portion of our history.

The first problem was easily solved when Aunt Lucerne, keeper of the original diary, sent me a fresh, readable copy. But I was still faced with the question: What is this all about? Then, while browsing through the F section of the Reference Library at the College of St. Catherine, I made a discovery that, to quote Henry Annis, made me feel better than a whole box of Hardtack would. That was the discovery of the 128 volumes of The War of The Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies published in 1890, and the twelve-volume set of The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events published in 1865. Here was primary source material! What Henry’s memoirs didn’t tell me, I could learn firsthand from his commanding officers. I knew I had found my mission in life.

This is the story of Henry Brown Annis, a man of his time who was caught up in the times. An everyday dirt and grunt Union Army soldier, Henry, like many of his contemporaries, wrote of his experiences in the Civil War, waxing poetic with what the Civil War historian, Bruce Catton, describes as the embroideries and purple passages of many an author of the time, and at the same time documenting the mundane, grub details of a soldier’s existence. Throughout the memoirs, Henry’s devotion to his country, his sense of humor, and his compassion shine through.

Henry enlisted in Company B, 96th Illinois Infantry on August 9, 1862. For nearly a year his regiment was relatively inactive, engaging in some minor skirmishes in Tennessee and, according to his army record, Henry spent three months in and out of hospitals in Ohio and Kentucky. Then, in the later part of the summer of 1863, the 96th Illinois and Henry were ordered to southeastern Tennessee, near Chattanooga, where the Union and Confederate forces were gathering for a showdown. The regimental history of the 96th Illinois and Henry Annis’s military career revolved around this theater of action which, for the North, was an important turning point of the War. William Wood summed up the significance of the campaign when he wrote, Chattanooga meant that the Union forces had at last laid the axe to the root of the tree.* The way was opened for Sherman’s march to the sea.

Writing of his experience some years after the end of the War, Henry assumes, and rightfully so, that his readers had a grass roots familiarity with the Battle above the Clouds. To fully understand Henry Annis’s experience, I have tried to put it into its larger context, the Chattanooga Campaign, which included the bloody, but indecisive fracas, as Henry calls it, at Chickamauga, September 19 and 20, 1863; and its culmination on November 23, 24, and 25 in the Battle of Chattanooga where the fighting